The use of mobile electronics is growing by leaps and bounds. Mobile devices, such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), are transforming from relatively-simple single-function devices into complex devices with both telephone and PDA capabilities. With these improvements comes a greater need for configurability and maintenance. With each type of application or functionality installed on a mobile device comes additional configuration settings. In the past, configuration settings for the mobile device were set one time, such as during a “bootstrap provisioning” transaction, and either not changed or changed by manually activating a keypad or other input system on the mobile device, which of course requires physical access to the mobile device.
As these devices become more and more complex, there is a greater chance that configuration settings stored on the mobile device will need to be changed. For instance, a service provider may have a need to change the phone number to which the mobile device responds, or to modify a setting related to an e-mail application on the device. However, it may be important that the service provider know what the current settings on the mobile device are because in some circumstances settings can conflict between two applications or services. For that reason, it would be helpful if the service provider could discover the current state of any settings on the mobile device. Unfortunately, there is no existing mechanism known for remotely discovering what the existing configuration settings are.
Largely for those reasons, maintaining mobile devices in use by a mobile communications system is very burdensome. A typical maintenance scenario might be that a user calls a tech support contact (maybe the mobile operator or maybe a corporate helpdesk) and complains about a problem. The current remedy is for the support technician to walk the user through a long complicated series of steps to determine the current configuration of the mobile device, and then walks the user through a number of steps to fix the configuration. This is obviously a very tedious process, labor intensive, and prone to human error.
Additionally, in an effort to control the total cost of ownership (TCO) of running complicated devices, the mobile device may be configured so that the end user does not have permission to view or modify the settings which are involved in their problem. In order to control TCO and prevent the user from corrupting the settings, end user access to the settings can be controlled. In that case, the support technician requires this functionality in order to correctly diagnose the problem. Until now, a solution to these problems has eluded those skilled in the art.